Women’s Reproductive Health in Yemen By T.S. Sunil and Vijayan P ...

children are consumer durable, an increase in income is likely to increase fertility (Blake, 1968); that is, a rise in average income is said to increase an individual's aspirations to social advancement and his or her desire for goods, which then compete with the number of children for family resources. This eventually reduces the number of children people want. In this situation, according to Becker (1965), individual couples try to balance quantity and quality in decisions about the number of children they want. Several studies have empirically tested the new-home economics framework on fertility (Ermisch, 1979; T. P. Schultz, 1981). This school of thought, called the Chicago–Columbia school of thought, emphasizes that the relationship between true income elasticity for both child quality and child quantity is positive (Becker, 1960, Becker & Lewis, 1973; Willis, 1974). However, several studies have found a negative relationship between income and fertility (Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1985, Shields & Tracy, 1986). Thus, the new-home economics theory confined the argument of fertility decline to the demand for and supply of children.

Easterlin (1969) added a supply function to his synthesis framework and grouped the explanatory variables into “demand” and “supply” categories. The economic framework was further revised and reformulated by several researchers and economists; some examples include diffusion of innovations theory (E. Rogers, 1973), Caldwell's (1982) wealth flow theory, the ideational theory enunciated by Cleland and Wilson (1987), and Cleland (1985).

Easterlin (1975) introduced the supply–demand economic framework for fertility analysis. This explains fertility in terms of three proximate determinants: (a) the supply of children, that is, the number of children the parents would bear in the absence of deliberate fertility limitation; (b) the demand for children